


Sick Lungs, Beating Heart

by crumbsfiction



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, shortfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-13
Updated: 2013-08-13
Packaged: 2017-12-23 09:19:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/924633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crumbsfiction/pseuds/crumbsfiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Night Vale is alive, Carlos knows. Not alive in the more scientific sense of the word; the town has no heart to pump its life around and no brain to host a consciousness, but it holds eyes and ears that Carlos cannot see and the wind that strokes his cheeks sometimes sounds like the last rattling breaths from sick and dying lungs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sick Lungs, Beating Heart

Night Vale is alive, Carlos knows. Not alive in the more scientific sense of the word; the town has no heart to pump its life around and no brain to host a consciousness, but it holds eyes and ears that Carlos cannot see and the wind that strokes his cheeks sometimes sounds like the last rattling breaths from sick and dying lungs.

-

He’s been there for a week, and he’s not scared. The citizens, of whom he has met few, are twisted and strange and broken, but not dangerous, not harmful. He thinks. There’s an old woman who claims that she can talk to angels and a man in a ridiculously offending Native American headpiece who Carlos hasn’t had the chance (or frankly, desire) to hold a proper conversation with yet.

And then there’s a radio host with platinum hair and purple eyes that frankly just seems like a genetic impossibility but hey, who is he to judge. Maybe he wears coloured contacts under those clunky glasses. Of all the Night Vale residents, Cecil Baldwin was the one who seems the most enthusiastic about having him around, vigorously shaking Carlos’ hand and telling him to stop by his workplace anytime, for a proper welcoming interview. Judging by the host’s gusto, Carlos guesses that there are not many people who decide to move to Night Vale. He can sort of guess why.

The more time that pass, the more his confusion about the whole place deepens. A Dog Park he’s not under any circumstances allowed to enter, mandatory poetry writing weeks and water parks without water. Sometimes his food bleeds and it takes all of Carlos’ willpower to stop himself from throwing up.

He calls Cecil a few times, his number taken from the purple business card that he found in his jacket one day, asking him to inform the citizens about baffling scientific phenomena that no one but him seems to care about. He always gets asked out for coffee and he always declines. He has work to do.

Days turn into weeks turn into months and Carlos loses track of time. It doesn’t work anyway, he’s decided and he just can’t bring himself to care anymore. His work reaches dead end after dead end and the kinks and twists and knots that he’s meant to be working out and straightening up just seem to get more complicated the more he digs and prods and pokes. It’s like Night Vale itself doesn’t want to be uncovered or understood, like it’s working against Cecil to make sure that he’ll never get to the bottom of what’s truly going on in that small desert town that he’s not even sure exists on the same plane of consciousness as the rest of the world. If he believed in parallel universes, he would guess that Night Vale was located in some kind of wormhole, but he’s an ecologist, not a physicist, and so his questions remain unanswered.

Carlos takes up listening to Cecil’s show as he works. Equations and calculations just seem to run smoother with the radio host’s voice in the background. The remarks about Carlos himself and his, apparently, perfect appearance is a bit disturbing but he doesnät have the heart to ask Cecil to stop.

It’s not until he comes home one day and the whole apartment has been laterally reversed that he realises what his time in Night Vale has done to him. Instead of breaking out his beeping and whirring equipment and setting up the tests, he just shrugs, kicks his shoes off and goes to get a glass of water. 

He stands there at the sink, hand clutching the glass with something in it that doesn’t look the least bit clear, and then he cracks. He grabs his keys from the table near the door (it’s on the opposite side of where it used to be now and he almost walks right into it), slams the door behind him and doesn’t bother locking up. He takes the stairs two at a time and then he’s in the car, shoving his keys into the ignition as the vehicle roars to life under him. The car, a beaten up and rusty old Chevy, choughs a few times and sputters for a while before Carlos can step on the gas.

He’s outside the town borders within minutes and soon it’s just him and the endless desert stretching its vastness out in all direction, Carlos drives. He hits the knob on the radio, which slowly crackles to life, and then Cecil’s smooth voice is filling the car. Any other time he would listen, but right now he’s just not in the mood to hear about some boy-scout ceremony that he has no interest in attending. He turns it off.

He doesn’t know for how long he drives, the wristwatch he always used to wear is shoved into a drawer somewhere because who needs a watch when time itself doesn’t work? Eventually, he sees flickering lights in the distance, a red neon sigh and a radio tower and he thinks finally, somewhere normal, somewhere safe. Just a short while, a few hours of blessed sanity, anything except the omnipresent town that seems to have dulled his senses and his brain alike. 

As he drives closer, he feels his heart drop to his toes. He parks the truck next to the sign that cheerily declares “Welcome To Night Vale!”, steps out of the car and screams. His voice disappears into the dunes of sand and Carlos screams and yells and claws at thin air until his voice goes hoarse and he’s panting for breath. Eventually he sinks to the ground and stays there, legs tucked in beneath him. He readjusts the glasses that sit crookedly on his nose and stands up. He brushes of his pants, his shirt too for good measure, and then he drives back to his apartment. 

-

Time passes. One day he finds himself in a bowling alley, standing over a tiny town with tiny residents, careful not to step on any of them. A radio is on in the background. He hears Cecil’s voice, as ever, but doesn’t register the words. He’s made a mental note to ask the radio host about how he always manages to repost what’s happening while it’s happening, but he’s never gotten around to it. Maybe later. 

Ten minutes later, he realises that there might not be a later and this is not how he planned to die, lying on top of a tiny city in a run down bowling alley, bleeding out from his temple where he was shot by a tiny, but very angry, civilization of tiny and angry people. It’s so ridiculous and far-fetched that he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He whimpers vaguely in pain instead.

Cecil’s voice is growing increasingly frantic on the radio and then it cracks and breaks and Carlos thinks that oh, he actually cares. Then, out of seemingly nowhere, the Apache Tracker is standing over him, hoisting him up on his broad shoulders and the feathers of his headpiece tickles Carlos in the nose before he passes out.

-

He comes to on the hood of a car, his car, but no one else is around. He hears noise in the distance, people talking and shouting, but he doesn’t pay them any mind. His shirt is still covered with blood but his face is clean and when he reaches up to touch his temple, there is nothing under his trembling fingertips but smooth, healed skin. 

Carlos pulls his phone out of his pocket, just to have something to do, and a purple business card flutters to the ground. He picks it up, and then it hits him. Cecil’s voice, desperate and on the brink of breaking and the fact that someone in this godforsaken hellhole actually cares whether he lived or died. He dials Cecil’s number.

-

Night Vale is alive, Carlos knows. Sometimes the air around him shoots sparks when he gets to close to the dog park with his lab equipment and his footsteps on the pavement more often than not sound like heartbeats but right here, in this moment, the air around them is calm and warm and the town seems soothing somehow. Kind

Carlos has his hand placed gently on Cecil’s knee and Cecil has his head resting on Carlos’ shoulder. In the end, “I just wanted to see you,” was all it took. Night Vale breathes with easing breaths and Carlos, once again, loses track of time.

**Author's Note:**

> I am fashionably late to the party, but I just had to write something with these two.


End file.
